Colonialism & Expansionism Literature: Blake’s Poem Essay

The notion of racism divides humans based on their individual visible and intellectual differences. It has a great impact on the past and the humanities. This terminology breaks people down on different races, supposing that the better race should be dominant over the worse one (DiSalvo, et al. 278). A significant number of distinguished people tried to solve this problem.

The poem “Little Black Boy” touches on a painful subject for the British. At the time when it was written (between 1784 and 1789), the trade of slaves was a usual thing, especially trade of black people. There was plenty of poetry in England directed against slavery or racism, and Blake’s poem seemed to fit into this wave (DiSalvo, et al. 351). In this poem, innocent children know a lot: they know that their assistant is God, they see the beauty of nature; a little black boy knows that the difference between him and the white boy is only in skin color. Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography provides the story of Equiano’s life, his struggle for the good life (Kopec 462). His difficult fate of a slave began at the age of eleven, because of kidnapping. Only after hard work and years of traveling in a British trading vessel, he manages to obtain freedom by giving all his savings.

In conclusion, it is obvious that this blatantly expressed William Blake and Olaudah Equiano have gifts to realize how directly the events, phenomena, conflicts of distant countries and distant epochs are involved in people’s destinies and their own destiny. Both of these works overlap significant political and social problems that include attitude towards other races affront to their civil liberties.

Works Cited

Kopec, Andrew. “Collective Commerce and the Problem of Autobiography in Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 54 no. 4, 2013, pp. 461-478.

DiSalvo, Jackie, et al., editors. Blake, Politics, and History. Taylor and Francis, 2015.